It’s not a question of resting on your laurels. I do see your point there, but these teams are historically great and produce a large amount of great players into the world game. It’s important for the World Cup to showcase these players for the build up of their brand and marketing the game and it’s beauty and excellence to the whole world. Many of the smaller teams come to these tournaments and play defensive team oriented football that is very boring to the purists and to those who love to see lots of goals and individual skills on display, they are nothing more than anti-football.

Take Greece for example. In 2004 they pulled off one of the great miracles in sports history. It was great for their country, their football program and the game but the fact is, they played dull and pedestrian football. They basically set up ten men behind the ball and defended for 90 minutes and scored their odd goal from set pieces. Congrats to them but it was not a showcase for the game. Brazil, Argentina are showcases for the game. Pele, Maradona, Zidane, Cruyff, Messi and Ronaldo are showcases for the game, not Zakorakis, or Basinas or countless other no names on a hard working but boring team who win ugly and send the game into the Middle Ages from a tactical and entertainment point of view. And the only ones who would disagree with me there are Greeks and other minnow nations who play a similar style of football. The game is about entertainment and scoring goals, not building fortresses and defending for dear life.

The game needs to maintain it’s entertainment value and beauty and those seeded teams guarantee that it keeps that. If one or two of those teams really go into the tank form wise for more than five or ten years, then like Uruguay (a two time winner), they get moved out of a sure seeding position. The seedings are not set in stone They are there for the existing eight but can be modified over decades to include new teams and exclude others that have fallen on prolonged hard times. But what this system does is maintain a certain quality, class and expectation for both fans of the game as well as purists who love history, tradition and above all, talent based football. I believe in the beautiful game, not the drudgery that 95% of the national teams in the world serve on a yearly basis.